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Gentleman Freddy

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Roanne, just out of jail, went to cop. That is, she went to beg fat little Freddy the dopeman to front her once more. She'd have to fuck Freddy, of course, but, well, maybe he'd wait until after this time. Likely not…

the heart would have unnatural reverence

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The heart would have unnatural reverence, exalted, bursting with evil, rolling in sloth, if it did not at once reveal its innocence. I saw you again, on the morning of the sun. It was you, or your double, or a son you might have had. Your beautiful bloo

Bio Bit

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It was your present world that seemed more than mad to me. Your polished stiff brown shoes that always squeaked like mice, while the latest rude Bombers bubbled up in their comfortable Dart-board garages like apple pies…

Fragment from a Paper Story

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While Leif was still very young, his emotions were very easy to read, for they appeared on his parchment coloured skin, named in his mother's writing. When he was seventeen, Leif fell in love. She was a pretty maid, one of the college servants who kept his…

Pain

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My pain is a black pearl hidden in a clean shell.

Passings

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Perhaps my grandparents, Fred and Lela, when they were growing up....

Old Friends Getting Older

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I just amuse myself by buying old guns and refurbishing them in my basement as I listen to old Bohemian polkas on cassettes.

Four: Of Moths, Poets, and Streambanks

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“And what kind of man would prefer all these dusty old books to my physical form? Who would memorize archaic incantations, when he could be whispering in my ear? Why search for the ancient splendors of metaphor, when one could be searching for the ...

As the Bat Cave Turns

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A study found that in bat species noted for female monogamy male bats have small testes and big brains, while in species noted for female promiscuity males have testicles five times as big, but smaller brains.

Esmeralda

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Being an uncredited bonus composition, written in the sublimest access of divine afflatus this poet believes his lyric verse has ever known. “In olden times, dark was not counted fair”: Those were the words, I think, of some old poet. …

surrogate

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the vigilance that informs a parent's every hour had momentarily lapsed

Possible Candidates for Reading to a Crowd

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"Possible candidates for reading to a crowd" the subject line of the email to myself read. You see, writing can be hard - or writing can be easy. But writing for a crowd you'll see is something else entirely.

Ben Clarone: Prologue Part 2

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This was not the bar that the artist usually frequented.

it

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where will we be/ when it happens?

Deadly duel: Blow v. Teach

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At last, we learn if Blow has the cojones to fight.

The First Time

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The summer I turned fourteen I had a job babysitting our neighbor, Pam's three year old daughter, Annie, three nights a week while Pam was going to Junior College, but it was hardly work because, after I tucked Annie in to sleep, I just watched TV, sitting in Pam's den…

Window

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Seen from the window, …

I Am Not Like All The Rest: Funny Lines From Online Dating Profiles

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After becoming single at age 62, I joined an online dating site. After a year of perusing profiles and meeting men for coffee, staying single is starting to look better and better to me. But I've stayed on the site, in part for the pure enjoyment of…

Any Given Recent Day

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Ten-year-old Bobby Akins learned that a shotgun shell struck on its brass end with a hammer can indeed take out the left eye of an eight-year-old brother observing the proceedings close by.

Her Man in the Navy Blues

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In that time when the trunk was getting cleared out and when it became only the empty shell of what had once been so important, many things hit the match. She burned an old black negligee, a picture competing with the likes of a Vargas girl and other thin

Aisle Seven

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A young boy, breathing heavily from running, stopped at her feet, barely able to speak,

To See Who's There

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Able to search through centuries, I click, scribble, skim,resurrect wet stone walls, the smell of burning peat.Bob's your uncle; Peggy's your aunt.Name your family, child. My brother said helloto Uncle Shirley and Aunt Greg. I was more…

Waves of Memory

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"Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. It doesn’t mean anyone is to blame - It just is."

Worry Is for the Well-Rested

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I'm in the boardroom, downtown in San Francisco. I don't even remember showing up for work today. I hope they fire me, just like they fired Bill. Well not exactly like that, that was awful. He was caught downloading a phenomenal amount of…

skull of a sheep

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You are in a car speeding through Dublin towards the West year after year the journey uncoils past the same landmarks Kilmainham Jail strapped to a chair bullet to the brain on by the Rowntree Mackintosh factory where the black and yellow and orange and r

All his things

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All the things that are his.

A Record of Wrongs

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A dead deer on the side of the road and the older boys not listening to her as they stab its eye with a stick.

###moth#7###

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what was she like you ask? smarter than me for instance she could type alot faster. and she didn’t worry constantly about being poor or having a family looking over her shoulder. maybe that’s what she did with boys. 17 years later and she is in my bed

Flash Before Your Eyes

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It was the dead of winter. I took my father's shotgun from his closet. He kept it wrapped up in one of those khaki-colored gun tote bags that had a zipper running the whole length of the gun. It was a 16-gauge, single action shotgun. Anyone could tell wha

Freedom

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She tossed the big bird into the air. It wobbled, then flew away.